With Frank Sinatra’s iconic mugshot tattooed on her arm, up-and-coming singer Anna Moon honors her influences from the past with deep reverence while maintaining a commitment to her own musical integrity.
Her love for jazz and the likes of Sinatra and Billie Holiday shines through in her sultry, jazzy sound while her personal bold edge infuses her songs with the rough-and-tumble rebel vibes of an eyeliner-clad Joan Jett type with a sweet slant. She is committed to musical integrity and just being herself, however that self may evolve over the next couple of years.
“I’m not trying to be like anybody else. I’m not trying to copy anybody else or be on anybody else’s wavelength. I really wanted to create something that’s uniquely my own sound and instrumentation,” Moon said.
With her grandmother being a jazz pianist, Moon has always had a special place in her heart for the genre, but it wasn’t until she saw the late, great and soulful Amy Winehouse making it in mainstream music that she decided maybe she wanted to try to sing professionally too.
“It wasn’t until I was in my middle teens—I guess you could say when Amy came out—that I started saying, ‘Well this is cool, but where did this start? Where did she get all this inspiration from?’ So I started looking into that and some later era jazz like your Billie Holidays and the Franks and all these things and that’s when I really, really went down the rabbit hole of falling in love with jazz and learning that I have a natural ability to sing that way. It just kind of all fell into place,” said Moon.
Her debut album, XXX, set to be released in early 2019, is the culmination of a close collaboration with her producer, Jamie Kenney, and her husband and fellow musician, Nico Moon. She hopes the album speaks to fans and exhibits her diversity in style and taste. Think the likes of Elle King and Grace Sewell, only with her very own “Anna Moon” touch she promises to be faithful to until the very end.
“The best thing that I can do is just create music that is truthfully myself and that means truthfully original,” she explained. “And I hope that people enjoy that and find something in it that they like.”
Anna Moon is coming to Rudy’s Jazz Room here in Nashville on at 9pm on Nov. 27, and then again on Dec. 4 and 11. Tickets are available here or at the door for a $12 cover charge.
